March 17 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief
Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein said Moscow’s traffic jams are
the biggest obstacle to turning the capital into a financial
hub, according to Deputy Finance Minister Dmitry Pankin.

Blankfein and President Dmitry Medvedev discussed
investment opportunities in Russia and Medvedev’s plans for the
capital at a March 15 meeting outside Moscow that Pankin
attended.

“The first question we asked was about the main problem
for creating Moscow as a financial center,” Pankin said in an
interview in Moscow yesterday. “He said it was bottleneck from
the airport to the city center.”

Medvedev has named 27 people, including Blankfein, JPMorgan
Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon and Citigroup Inc. CEO Vikram
Pandit, to an advisory board as he seeks to bolster Russia’s
role in international finance, according to the Kremlin’s
website this month and a member of the board who declined to be
identified. Medvedev has made diversifying the economy of the
world’s biggest oil and gas supplier a priority.

Transport and infrastructure, as well as child care, are
priorities for bankers working in Moscow, Pankin said. Goldman
Sachs declined to comment, said a spokeswoman, who asked not to
be named, citing company policy.

‘Grueling’ Traffic

Mayor Sergei Sobyanin vowed to focus on easing
transportation in the capital and uprooting corruption after
Medvedev ousted Yury Luzhkov, who had governed the city for 18
years. The president wants investors in Moscow to feel “no less
comfortable than in London, Geneva or New York,” according to
the Kremlin website. Moscow ranked 68th of 75 cities in the
December 2009 Global Financial Centers Index commissioned by the
City of London.

Moscow drivers suffer the longest traffic jams of 20 major
cities, making for a “grueling” atmosphere that inhibits
commerce, according to a July report by International Business
Machines Corp.

The average Muscovite motorist spent a “whopping” 2 1/2
hours stuck in traffic at least once in the last three years,
IBM said in its global study on the “emotional and economic
toll of commuting.”

Goldman Sachs is also among the 23 banks selected by the
government last year to help manage its 1 trillion-ruble ($35
billion) state-asset sale program over three years.

Russia picked advisers “that have experience in launching
big projects” to help build Moscow into a financial hub, said
Alexander Voloshin, head of the government working group
overseeing the project and former chief of staff under
Presidents Vladimir Putin and Boris Yeltsin, in a Jan. 11
interview. “And those big banks that can bring business here.”